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“The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous community.”

—Theodore Roosevelt.

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I remember very well indeed that bitter period of transition when first the ideal, or lack of ideals, of the newer America began to corrode the old society. I remember with what intense bitterness and chagrin the early excesses of the earliest of the idle rich were condoned by the leaders of society in that day. At first the social world fought hard for its traditions, and the leaders of American Society of my father’s day were never reconciled to the changes that came about in the body social. In Boston and Philadelphia, to this day, society maintains its battle against the invader. Now, as then, society frowns upon the idle men. Only recently one of the leaders of Boston society quoted in the course of a conversation with me that powerful sentence from one of Mr. Roosevelt’s speeches:

“The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous community.”